Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Four-Man Rotation by Committee

DENVER — Dan O’Dowd, the embattled general manager of the Colorado Rockies, calls his experiment Project 5183, after the altitude at Coors Field. Some baseball purists are referring to it in far less lofty terms.

The Rockies were a laughingstock on June 20, 18 games below .500 and in a 6-15 tailspin. So Manager Jim Tracy had little to lose when he embraced O’Dowd’s retro idea of going to a four-man starting rotation with a modern curveball — limiting each starter to about 75 pitches, no matter how the game is going. The Rockies have gone 9-12 since. That is mediocre, but a slight improvement on laughingstock, and they are still on pace to lose nearly 100 games.

O’Dowd has tinkered with ways of taming Coors Field — baseball’s biggest pitcher’s nightmare — since arriving here in 2000. But, he admits, “we have not solved it.”

Storing baseballs in a humidor to counteract Denver’s thin, dry air brought hitters’ numbers down for a few years, but games at Coors Field are again averaging nearly 13 runs. O’Dowd has drafted 338 pitchers in 12 years, but he does not have five worthy of a conventional rotation.

Castoffs like Jason Hammel, 7-13 with the 2011 Rockies and 8-6 with the Baltimore Orioles this season, blossom once they leave town. Ubaldo Jimenez was 19-8 with the Rockies and an All-Star in 2010, but was 6-9 in 2011 with a 4.46 earned run average before being traded to Cleveland. The pitchers who remain are on pace to allow a franchise-record 565 walks this season.

Tracy said solving a Sudoku puzzle could be easier than solving the Rockies’ perennial pitching quandary. “And I’m no good at Sudoku,” said Tracy, who added that doing nothing would be a far greater offense than trying something unorthodox.

Photo

Manager Jim Tracy taking the ball from Jeff Francis, who has a 2.77 E.R.A. in five solid starts in the new rotation.Credit
David Zalubowski/Associated Press

O’Dowd’s “paired pitching system” takes four revolving starters — for the moment, they are Jeff Francis, Jeremy Guthrie and the rookies Drew Pomeranz and Christian Friedrich — and combines them with three rotating pitchers he calls piggybacks. Those three are now essentially serving as middle relievers, with an occasional start thrown in.

“We have to find the right seven,” O’Dowd said of the mix during a recent conference call with season-ticket holders. But he acknowledged, “Perhaps right now, we don’t have the right seven.”

The goal of all this is to help the Rockies’ young, inexperienced pitchers last further into the season by placing a greater workload on relievers who, counterintuitively, are now averaging almost as many innings as the starters.

But the results have been decidedly mixed. In one three-game stretch, the Rockies were outscored, 33-21. In another, the left-handed starters Francis, Friedrich and Pomeranz allowed just one run in 17 innings for an earned run average of 0.53. Yet the Rockies still lost two of those three games because of poor bullpen support. The team’s starting pitchers had a 5.22 E.R.A. since the experiment began. That is far better than the 6.28 going in, but still the worst in baseball. And the starting pitchers had posted just four wins in the 21 games since the pitch limit was imposed.

Josh Outman, who had an 11.00 E.R.A. as part of the new rotation, pitched himself back to the minors with three bad outings while Pomeranz has not given up an earned run in his last 121/3 innings. Francis has been resurgent, posting a 2.77 E.R.A. in five solid starts, but they lasted only 26 innings over all.

As a group, Rockies starters have made it to six innings just six times in the 21 games since the pitch limit was enforced. But three of those longer outings have come in the Rockies’ past five games. The team won all three, and the starters logged an 1.47 E.R.A.

Photo

Hitters thrive at Coors Field so Rockies General Manager Dan O’Dowd decided to go to a four-man rotation and limit starters to 75 pitches.Credit
David Zalubowski/Associated Press

It’s the brevity of the Rockies’ few quality starts, mandated by the pitch limit, that has drawn criticism so biting that, last Saturday, The Denver Post editorial board called for O’Dowd’s firing. It described his paired pitching system as “a desperate move by someone who has run out of real ideas and resulting in more of the same: losing.”

“It’s very difficult, no question about it,” Tracy said of lifting starters while they were still pitching effectively. “But what I don’t want down the road is for the head trainer to come to me and start telling me about how many sore arms we’ve got because the pitch count is getting pushed way beyond where it should be. That’s what makes it very easy for me. You have to be mindful of the fact that, three days later, you’re sending the same guy back out there. So it’s a trade-off.”

Francis said a fixed pitch count went against a pitcher’s competitive nature, but the current starting four have bought into the O’Dowd plan.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

“If you go five or six strong innings, you feel like you want more,” Francis said, “but that’s the job that’s laid out for us here. That’s the way the team is put together right now, and we have to get used to that.”

He added: “We are not doing it to try to trick anybody, that’s for sure. It’s an effort to try to keep us healthy, and only time will tell how successful it is. But it’s not a knee-jerk reaction. He has been thinking about it for a long time.”

O’Dowd insisted to season-ticket holders that this was not an act of desperation, and that it was not temporary.

Photo

Josh Outman (8), who had an 11.00 E.R.A. as part of the new rotation, pitched himself back to the minors with three bad outings.Credit
Tim Sharp/Associated Press

“We realize this is a little bit out of the box and we realize that there is some risk involved,” he said, adding, “Nothing is ever rewarded if you try to do something that is meek.”

O’Dowd pointed out that a pitcher’s E.R.A. typically rises half a point every time he cycles through an opponent’s lineup during a game. He said the primary goals were to get through the season while preventing injuries and limiting the number of runs scored against the Rockies.

“We have found that every starter who has pitched here for 185 to 200 innings for three consecutive years over the lifetime of this franchise has broken down with a significant injury,” he said.

The four-man rotation (minus the pitch count) was standard in baseball until the early 1970s. O’Dowd’s system will be a success, he said, not if it puts a team that is just five years removed from the World Series back into the playoffs, but if it reduces the number of pitches thrown by the Rockies by almost 25 percent over the course of a season.

“We are trying to create a mind-set with our young starters that if you want to stay in the game, you need to throw more quality and consistent strikes in the strike zone,” he said. “We are challenging them to do that.”

Tracy said the plan, and the pitchers, would evolve, but the system would remain when starters Jhoulys Chacin and Juan Nicasio return soon from injuries.

“When it comes to the cast of characters, the truth is, I don’t know from one day to the next,” Tracy said. “But we are committed to this.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2012, on Page SP2 of the New York edition with the headline: Four-Man Rotation By Committee. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe